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Updated: May 17, 2025


Those sometimes met with are the species of tarantula known as the hairy spider, the spider known as guava, and the blue spider, also the scorpion and the centipede. Their sting produces intense pain, inflammation and fever. They are found in crevices, under stones, in caves, and in rotten wood.

Even the brushwood is an imported fruit-tree, namely, the guava, which from its abundance has become as noxious as a weed. In Brazil I have often admired the varied beauty of the bananas, palms, and orange-trees contrasted together; and here we also have the bread-fruit, conspicuous from its large, glossy, and deeply digitated leaf.

Bates relates that an Indian father with his son went one day in their montario to gather fruit a short distance from Egga, when, landing on a sloping, sandy shore, the boy was left to take care of the canoe while the man entered the forest. The boy was playing in the water under the shade of some myrtle and wild guava trees, when a huge reptile stealthily wound its coils round him.

Here, too, is the guava-seller, with neatly sealed tin cans of this favorite preserve. Indeed, it seems to rain guava jelly in Cuba. At a shanty beside the road where we stop at noon, a large mulatto woman retails coffee and island rum, while a score of native whites lounge about with slouched hats, hands in pockets, and puffing cigarettes, pictures of idleness and indifference.

There were groves of cultivated guava, orange, lemon, and pomegranate. The oranges were of the Syrian variety, small but filled with scarlet honey. This fruit was McClintock's particular pride. He had brought the shrubs down from Syria, and, strangely enough, they had prospered. "Unless you have eaten a Syrian orange," he was always saying, "you have only a rudimentary idea of what an orange is."

The beaches of the Teffe form groves of wild guava and myrtle trees, and during most months of the year are partly overflown by the river. While the boy was playing in the water under the shade of these trees, a huge reptile of this species stealthily wound its coils around him, unperceived until it was too late to escape.

The well-cultivated plantations, each appearing like a village in itself, scattered among the many hills and valleys and intervals even to the very sea coast; the sea beyond, which at that distance seemed as smooth and polished as a mirror, encasing the island in a frame of silver; the luxuriant tropical foliage, whose beauty I had often heard described; the cocoanut, orange, tamarind, and guava trees, loaded with fruit, with plantains, bananas, pineapples, aloes and cactuses on every side, all filled my heart with wonder and delight.

When burnt chocolate colour, they are pounded to the consistency of thick honey, poured into a mould, a basket lined with banana leaves, and set for three days to dry in the sun: after this the cake, which in appearance resembles guava cheese, will keep through the year.

A visit to the Jardin des Plantes will complete the illusion to the most critical eye: and the lovers of romance may fancy themselves at once in Juan Fernandez, or in the Isle of France, as they walk in the open air, under the shade of palm-trees, and seeing tea, coffee, guava fruit, and a hundred other exotic luxuries, growing in their natural state.

Our meals were obtained from a neighboring boarding-house which rejoiced in the name "American Restaurant," and was kept by a Filipina. She was a good soul, and had learned how to make cocoanut balls, so that we bade a glad adieu to the bananas and guava jelly. Our own particular waitress was a ten-year-old child, who said "hello" and smoked a cigar as long as herself.

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